Discover how your business can take advantage of Facebook to market your products and services. Plus we reveal the best strategies showing you how to do it effectively.

The Internet offers all kinds of options for you in terms of marketing, so why should you invest your time and energy and money on Facebook?

The most basic answer would be to say; ‘because that is where your customers are’. It’s true. There are now over one billion users on Facebook, which is roughly a fifth of the world’s population. Given how huge it is, it is easy to forget that Facebook has only been around for less than 10 years now and, literally, it just seems like it’s taken over. It’s so big and it’s grown so fast. It is now part of people’s lives.

As a business owner, it makes sense to advertise where your customers are more likely to be. However, here are 9 very specific reasons why your business should be advertising on Facebook.

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Reach Your Target Audience

As mentioned earlier, there are over a billion users are on Facebook. Think about that for a moment. That is 51% of all Internet users. That’s just incredible.

That means there are a huge number of people in just about every group that you could possibly want to target, no matter what business you are in. You can literally reach any age group, male or female, living in just about any country of the world with just about any interest or hobby that you can imagine.

No matter who it is that you’re trying to target, you are going to find them on Facebook in very large numbers and you are going to have the ability to engage them in a variety of ways.

Facebook has several ways that you can advertise to people within Facebook that gives you more opportunities to reach and engage with their users. It really is difficult to think of another effective advertising medium that you can use to target this many people as you will seen in the second reason.

Laser Precision Target Marketing

Not only are you able to reach such a large amount of people, but you can also target them very specifically.

There is no other advertising platform that allows you to target as specifically and precisely as Facebook, which is one of the reasons that makes it most valuable and most intriguing for small businesses to take advantage of.

If you are like most small businesses, you will probably only have a very limited marketing budget, if any at all. You simple don’t have the money to waste on sloppy untargeted advertising. If you decided to run an ad in your local newspaper it is pretty safe to say that 90% of the people who will see that ad will not be your target customer. However, prior to online marketing you would have had to invest a huge amount of money in these untargeted ad campaigns. You wouldn’t have had a choice if you wanted to reach new customers.

Well, with Facebook you can target on very specific data so that exactly the right kind of people see your ad.

For example, you can target customers on their location, all the way down to the zip code or area code. You can target on their age and on their specific birthday. You can target your audience based on their education levels and you can even target them on where they went to school and exactly what class they graduated from.

It doesn’t end there. Your audience can be targeted based on their social connections, which means that you can target them based on the friends that they have, the groups that they’re a part of and the things that they associate with socially.

You can target your audience not only on their demographics, but also on their interests, such as their favorite movie, their favorite restaurants and places that they like to travel.

That’s all incredibly valuable data that allows you to target very precisely and specifically. Then of course you have their relationship status. If you’re selling something related to relationship status you can reach your target audience directly based on whether or not somebody is married or engaged or single.

There really is almost no end to how creative you can get by targeting on these different factors and it’s not as if you’re targeting just on one of these factors. You can combine them to create a level of targeting that is just absolutely precise.

For example, let’s say that you owned a children’s toy store in your hometown and you want to target people who live in your city who are parents, have young children, who make a certain amount of money and maybe who have expressed interest in certain types of movies or Disney products or things like that. Well, you can get to that level of targeting on Facebook and advertise directly to them. Now your advertising spend becomes very precisely targeted and that leads to…

Have Absolute Control over Your Advertising Costs

Advertisers in Facebook control exactly how much they spend for each campaign and the budgets can be very low. You can spend as little as $50 a day in Facebook. Obviously, you could never have a budget that small if you wanted to advertise on television, radio or even print ads in your newspaper.

With Facebook advertising you can control your budget down to a very small level compared to other advertising, but the most effective way of controlling your budget in Facebook is the fact that you have that very specific targeting.

There is a very famous quote from John Wanamaker who said that half of his advertising was wasted. He just didn’t know which half. Well, with Facebook you do know which half because you can target your advertising so efficiently and you can see the results of that advertising so clearly that you can cut the waste and that leads to number four…

Cost Efficiency

That level of precision gives you efficiency. Every dollar is now used for its greatest impact. You can measure every single ad and how it’s performing on getting the specific results that you want and you can cut back your investment in the ads that are not working and put more investment, shift more of that investment to ads that are working.

So now dollar for dollar you’re getting very efficient advertising. You are getting ads that work in front of the most precisely targeted relevant audience for your products or services. So there really is no way that you can get more efficient in your advertising, which just means that you have to spend less to get the impact that you’re looking for.

Simplicity

Don’t be put off. All of what we have described so far may have sounded very complicated. But the amazing thing is that Facebook has done such a fantastic job of designing a really elegant user interface that makes advertising on their platform just super simple. If you have any experience with Google Adwords, you know that that can be a very complicated environment to advertise in. It’s very easy to go in there and just get lost in all of the detail of their advertising platform.

Facebook is exactly the opposite. Even though you have all of this laser targeting in Facebook, the interface to advertise couldn’t be any simpler. You can get in Facebook and create a campaign just in a matter of minutes precisely targeting the audience that you go after. That simplicity is very powerful, meaning that you spend much less time trying to manage the system and more managing your advertising.

Targeting Based on Interests

We’ve talked about this before. The ideal selling situation is if you could have a one-on-one conversation with somebody that you know is the perfect candidate for your products or services. On the far other end of that spectrum is doing true mass-market advertising where you’re running an ad on television or you’re putting an ad in a major newspaper or on the radio. You know that that ad is reaching tons and tons of people, but you also know that many of those people are not at all the people that are going to actually respond to your advertising.

So, ideally, if you could drive your advertising down to a more personal conversational level but still be able to do it to a huge number of people then you would obviously have just this amazing advertising vehicle. Well, that’s what Facebook allows you to do.

It allows you to target your message down to these very small specific groups of people and then display ads to them in a manner that they’re customized and have the right approach to really resonate with that group that you’re targeting. It just makes every ad that you’re putting out there much, much more relevant and much more laser targeted to the audience that you’re going after.

Split Testing For Better Results

Anybody who’s done any advertising online knows that one of the most powerful things about advertising online is that you can do quick and easy tests of one ad versus another ad to find out which one is performing better and then cut your losses on the weaker ad and raise your investments in the stronger ad. This is something that’s very hard to do in traditional advertising; again, going back to that quote from John Wanamaker – I know that half of my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half. Well, by doing these simple A/B tests you can determine which of your ads are wasteful and you can put your money behind the top-performing ads.

You can do simple test ads very quickly and efficiently in Facebook that will give you data to tell you how you should be advertising to your market, which ads are most effective and where you should be putting your advertising dollars; again, something very hard to do with traditional advertising.

Social Proof Increases Your Sales

We all know the power of social proof in determining what products or services we buy. If we see our friends like certain types of products, we’re more interested in those products. If we have a business colleague of ours that uses certain services at their business, we’re probably more likely then to try those services at our business. That social proof aspect is powerful and that’s really at the heart of what makes Facebook so powerful.

Statistics reveal that 68% of Facebook users say a friend’s referral would increase their chances of purchasing a given product or services. With Facebook friends-of-fans targeting, you can advertise to the friends of your fans. So if you have a Facebook page for your business or for your products in Facebook and one your customers ‘likes’ your page, they are now a fan of your page. You can now advertise to their friends. You can say hey, to all the friends of John out there, John likes our products and services. Maybe you should come and check them out as well. So now people viewing your ad will see that someone they know is already a fan of your brand.

This is social proof and it’s incredibly powerful and this capability is really pretty unique to Facebook. There are other social platforms that you can do a similar type of advertising, but none of those platforms have anywhere near the reach that Facebook does. Facebook is unique in that it has so many people on its network that this type of advertising becomes very powerful.

In fact, let me just share with you some of the facts and figures to show how powerful this is. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, so if you advertise to the friends of your fans and let’s say that you have 100 fans, you now have the ability to reach 13,000 of their friends. Imagine that. Imagine if you could have your customers go out and refer your products or services to 13,000 of their friends. Obviously, that would be incredibly powerful marketing for your business. Well, that’s exactly what you can do with friends-of-fans targeting in Facebook.

Mobile targeting…this is very important

Mobile Internet usage has surpassed desktop usage, meaning more people are now accessing information, searching, and being entertained while they are on their phones and on the go.

80% of Facebook’s daily users are now on mobile, and 30% of all ecommerce purchases are now happening on mobile devices – and that number is growing quickly.

So you HAVE to be targeting mobile users with your ads, and Facebook is uniquely designed to give you this opportunity.

So there you have nine valid reasons why your business should be advertising on Facebook. Hopefully you can now see the power of using Facebook advertising and why you should use Facebook advertising for your business compared to some of those other advertising options. In the next article we will share some tips showing you how to use Facebook Advertising the right way to get better results.